Road Trip 2011 – Day 41 – Badlands, SD & Sage Creek Campground

We booked it on up to Badlands, SD after getting away from the flooding of Nebraska/Iowa. We stopped for a brief moment to check out the Corn Palace in Mitchell, SD. Another tip from Bill who said it was worth checking out. But I think even if he hadn’t told us to stop, we would have… there were only about 500 signs for it once we entered SD!

We got to our campground after dark, so once again we had no idea what the landscape around us looked like. All we knew was that the dirt road we drove down was about 15 miles long and we almost ran into a buffalo that was on the edge of the road! When we woke up, we found we were on a large prairie with big rolling hills and the Badlands in the distance. Sage Creek Campground is a free camping area which is always awesome… but there are no fires allowed and some guy at a gas station had told us to watch out for rattle snakes so we just camped in the car.

Before we went to drive around the Badlands National Park, we decided to hike over to a gorge where we assumed we would find the creek. We made it to the pile of wood that you see in this photo below when I almost stepped on a rattle snake and freaked out. I was so shaken up I couldn’t move until Ben carried me out of the tall grass on his back.

Before we could even get out of the camping area we came across more bison in the road